We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models, latent Dirichlet allocation and the hierarchical Dirichlet process topic model. Usin…
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48 results for “stochastic variational inference”
Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm in the sequential data setting. Our algorithm is applicable to both finite hidden Markov models and hierarchical D…
Paper proposes a second-order method for faster SVI convergence.
problem Poor convergence rate of first-order SVI algorithms.
method Derives Hessian matrix and implements two numerical schemes for efficient second-order SVI.
result Proposed approach achieves faster convergence compared to first-order SVI.
New guarantees for black-box variational inference methods.
problem Insufficient theoretical guarantees for black-box variational inference.
method Novel convergence guarantees for stochastic optimization of variational inference.
result Provable convergence of proximal and projected stochastic gradient descent for variational inference.
Variational inference has experienced a recent surge in popularity owing to stochastic approaches, which have yielded practical tools for a wide range of model classes. A key benefit is that stochastic variational inference obviates the tedious process of deriving analytical expressions for closed-form variable updates…
Improves understanding of stochastic NGVI convergence rates.
problem Lack of knowledge about non-asymptotic convergence rates in stochastic NGVI.
method Proved non-asymptotic convergence rates for conjugate likelihoods and showed implicit optimization for non-conjugate likelihoods.
result First non-asymptotic convergence rate for stochastic NGVI in conjugate likelihoods.
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient descent, using Monte Carlo approximation for the gradients. This enables variatio…
We introduce incremental variational inference and apply it to latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Incremental variational inference is inspired by incremental EM and provides an alternative to stochastic variational inference. Incremental LDA can process massive document collections, does not require to set a learning …
We introduce TrustVI, a fast second-order algorithm for black-box variational inference based on trust-region optimization and the reparameterization trick. At each iteration, TrustVI proposes and assesses a step based on minibatches of draws from the variational distribution. The algorithm provably converges to a stat…
The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been demonstrated to select suboptimal variational parameters, often resulting in consi…
New framework improves stochastic optimization for variational inference.
problem Improving variational posterior approximations in high-dimensional models.
method Developed a robust stochastic optimization framework using Markov chains.
result Demonstrated improved accuracy and robustness across diverse models.
A new method for efficient Gaussian process regression reduces complexity and improves scalability.
problem Efficient Gaussian process regression for large datasets.
method Learnable coreset-based variational inference for Gaussian processes.
result CVGP reduces the dimensionality of the variational parameter search space to linear complexity.
A trust-region method for stochastic variational inference with applications to streaming datastat.ML
Stochastic variational inference allows for fast posterior inference in complex Bayesian models. However, the algorithm is prone to local optima which can make the quality of the posterior approximation sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters and initialization. We address this problem by replacing the natural gradi…
We empirically evaluate a stochastic annealing strategy for Bayesian posterior optimization with variational inference. Variational inference is a deterministic approach to approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models in which a typically non-convex objective function is locally optimized over the parameters of t…
Bayesian inference using stochastic neural networks ensembles.
problem Approximating Bayesian posterior distributions.
method Formulate stochastic ensembles of neural networks, train with variational inference, and evaluate using Monte Carlo dropout.
result Stochastic ensembles provide more accurate posterior estimates than other methods.
CoSMIC extends flow-based SVI to transdimensional problems.
problem Bayesian structure learning and model selection with multi-model parameter spaces.
method Normalizing flows with a combined stochastic variational transdimensional inference approach.
result Improved performance on high-cardinality model spaces.
Stochastic optimization techniques are standard in variational inference algorithms. These methods estimate gradients by approximating expectations with independent Monte Carlo samples. In this paper, we explore a technique that uses correlated, but more representative , samples to reduce estimator variance. Specifical…
Stochastic VB improves nonlinear model inference speed and accuracy.
problem Bayesian inference of nonlinear models from noisy data.
method Stochastic Variational Bayesian (VB) inference for nonlinear models.
result Stochastic VB achieves comparable parameter recovery to analytical solution but is faster.
Stochastic Bayesian Neural Network improves scalability and performance.
problem Challenges in calculating posterior distribution in Bayesian Neural Networks.
method Maximizes Evidence Lower Bound using Stochastic Evidence Lower Bound objective function.
result Demonstrates improved performance and scalability over previous algorithms.
A new method interpolates between sampling and variational inference using stochastic mixtures.
problem Combining the strengths of sampling and variational inference methods.
method Develops a framework using stochastic mixtures of simple component distributions to interpolate between sampling and variational inference.
result Improves on both sampling and variational inference methods by reducing bias and variance.
We develop a variational framework for SDEs driven by fractional noise.
problem Capturing long-term dependencies in SDEs driven by fractional noise.
method Markov approximation of fractional Brownian motion, variational inference, neural networks.
result Efficient variational inference of posterior path measures for neural-SDEs.
Generalised Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models (GPLVM) with Stochastic Variational Inferencecs.LG
A scalable GPLVM model using stochastic variational inference.
problem Scalable inference for Gaussian process latent variable models.
method Doubly stochastic formulation of Bayesian GPLVM with minibatch training.
result High-fidelity reconstructions in the presence of missing data.
We introduce local expectation gradients which is a general purpose stochastic variational inference algorithm for constructing stochastic gradients through sampling from the variational distribution. This algorithm divides the problem of estimating the stochastic gradients over multiple variational parameters into sma…
We consider the probabilistic analogue to neural network matrix factorization (Dziugaite & Roy, 2015), which we construct with Bayesian neural networks and fit with variational inference. We find that a linear model fit with variational inference can attain equivalent predictive performance to the regular neural networ…
This paper develops scalable control variates for Monte Carlo methods using stochastic optimization.
problem Reducing variance in Monte Carlo estimators for large-scale problems.
method Control variates based on Stein operators, optimized through stochastic optimization.
result Novel theoretical results and empirical validations show effective variance reduction.
Guarantees convergence for black-box variational inference without modifications.
problem Convergence guarantees for black-box variational inference.
method Analysis of log-smooth posterior densities, location-scale variational family, and convergence rates of algorithm design choices.
result Proximal stochastic gradient descent fixes suboptimal convergence rates and achieves strongest known guarantees.
Paper introduces f-divergence variational inference for broader application.
problem Variational inference limited to specific divergences.
method Generalizes variational inference to all f-divergences using f-divergence minimization.
result Unified framework for variational inference with arbitrary f-divergences.
Posterior inference in directed graphical models is commonly done using a probabilistic encoder (a.k.a inference model) conditioned on the input. Often this inference model is trained jointly with the probabilistic decoder (a.k.a generator model). If probabilistic encoder encounters complexities during training (e.g. s…
Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm for hidden Markov models, in a sequential data setting. Given a collapsed hidden Markov Model, we break its long M…
A scalable MOGP model with stochastic variational inference for many outputs.
problem Efficiently modeling data from multiple sources with many outputs.
method Stochastic variational inference for Latent Variable MOGP (LV-MOGP).
result Computational complexity per iteration is independent of the number of outputs.
Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is problematic when the number of parameters is in billions. In this paper, we propose e…
Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This requires the ability to integrate a sum of terms in the log joint likelihood using …
We develop a scalable method for Bayesian neural networks with stochastic differential equations.
problem Uncertainty quantification in deep neural networks.
method Gradient-based stochastic variational inference in continuous-depth Bayesian neural networks.
result Gradient estimator with zero variance as the approximation improves.
Scalable Gaussian process models trained with unbiased stochastic ELBO.
problem Training large capacity Gaussian process models on huge datasets.
method Unbiased stochastic variational inference for scalable GPs.
result Accurate inference on large datasets with up to 10 million basis functions.
Beta process is the standard nonparametric Bayesian prior for latent factor model. In this paper, we derive a structured mean-field variational inference algorithm for a beta process non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) model with Poisson likelihood. Unlike the linear Gaussian model, which is well-studied in the non…
Proposes VSGD optimizer combining probabilistic and gradient-based methods.
problem Uncertainty modeling in deep neural networks.
method Combines probabilistic and gradient-based approaches using SVI.
result VSGD outperforms Adam and SGD on image classification tasks.
BBVI relies on adaptive stochastic optimization algorithms for posterior approximation, but these require extensive tuning.
problem BBVI posterior approximation
method Adaptive stochastic optimization algorithms
result No single method dominates, but a selection of 5 suffices.
BayesPy is an open-source Python software package for performing variational Bayesian inference. It is based on the variational message passing framework and supports conjugate exponential family models. By removing the tedious task of implementing the variational Bayesian update equations, the user can construct model…
Recent advances in neural variational inference have spawned a renaissance in deep latent variable models. In this paper we introduce a generic variational inference framework for generative and conditional models of text. While traditional variational methods derive an analytic approximation for the intractable distri…
New method approximates diffusion process posteriors using moment functions.
problem Approximating posteriors of stochastic differential equations.
method Constructs variational process as controlled prior, approximates posterior with moment functions, uses natural gradient descent.
result Richer variational approximations for state-dependent diffusion terms.
Several recent works have explored stochastic gradient methods for variational inference that exploit the geometry of the variational-parameter space. However, the theoretical properties of these methods are not well-understood and these methods typically only apply to conditionally-conjugate models. We present a new s…
Stochastic variational inference is an established way to carry out approximate Bayesian inference for deep models. While there have been effective proposals for good initializations for loss minimization in deep learning, far less attention has been devoted to the issue of initialization of stochastic variational infe…
This paper presents a novel variational inference framework for deriving a family of Bayesian sparse Gaussian process regression (SGPR) models whose approximations are variationally optimal with respect to the full-rank GPR model enriched with various corresponding correlation structures of the observation noises. Our …
Variational inference algorithms have proven successful for Bayesian analysis in large data settings, with recent advances using stochastic variational inference (SVI). However, such methods have largely been studied in independent or exchangeable data settings. We develop an SVI algorithm to learn the parameters of hi…
Variational inference provides a powerful tool for approximate probabilistic in- ference on complex, structured models. Typical variational inference methods, however, require to use inference networks with computationally tractable proba- bility density functions. This largely limits the design and implementation of v…
Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical work suggests that inference networks can produce suboptimal variational parameter…
New convergence results for NGVI with various step sizes and sample sizes.
problem Understanding convergence of stochastic NGVI for various schedules.
method Projected stochastic NGVI for exponential family variational distributions.
result Geometric convergence and $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{T^ρ}
ight)$ rates for different schedules.
This paper provides a unifying theoretical framework for stochastic optimization algorithms by means of a latent stochastic variational problem. Using techniques from stochastic control, the solution to the variational problem is shown to be equivalent to that of a Forward Backward Stochastic Differential Equation (FBS…